


Becoming

by nanda (nandamai)



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Post-Canon, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1999-09-09
Updated: 1999-09-09
Packaged: 2017-10-10 05:09:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/95916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nandamai/pseuds/nanda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Back on earth, Kathryn finds she still has a lot to learn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Becoming

**Author's Note:**

> PG. I intended this as a friendship fic, but most people read it as a romance. Take your pick. The entire thing was inspired by the quote at the end.

**Day 3**

I used to say I wanted to get this crew home. Somewhere along the way, home became a euphemism for “the hell out of the delta quadrant.” Now I’m not sure what it means, but I think “strange” is a euphemism for “I’m not sure I belong here anymore.”

Starfleet held a celebration in our honor. The Federation Council thanked us for our bravery. But I noticed my crew tended to stick together. B’Elanna snapped at Tom; he put his arms around her and whispered something I couldn’t hear. Neelix held Naomi Wildman’s hand while Sam introduced her husband to her shipmates. Seven looked sick, drank too much champagne, and stayed close to the doctor. The doctor is the toast of the alpha quadrant, and I don’t think he understands that attention spans here are short. Tuvok and T’Pel linked fingers all night, one of hers curled around one of his; I think he was telling her our story through his pulse. Chakotay flashed that brilliant smile at all the right people, but I saw him counting the exits. My mother told me I looked like a different person.

Outside it was raining, and that was strange, too.

It is summer and I have forgotten what summer means.

**Day 5**

I still have a house, but I don’t have a dog.

Molly died last year. She was fourteen. Mark said I could have the two puppies he’s raised, but I told him to keep them. As for the house in Berkeley, I was sure my family would have sold it, but I hadn’t thought to ask and it seems they hadn’t thought to tell me. We’ve had other things to talk about.

Mark and his new—new? it’s been four years—wife, Devika, came into the city to meet me for dinner. She’s very nice and they both seem happy. I’m glad. I’m glad he didn’t lash himself to my memory, though it did sting when I heard the news, some 50,000 light years away. We met at a new Bajoran restaurant in the Mission. So many new things in this city, on this planet, in this quadrant.

Devika asked me if I was staying in my house or at Starfleet and I felt my eyes go wide and I stared at Mark. They had been ready to sell it, he said, when they’d gotten word through the array that we were alive after all. So it’s been sitting empty for all these years, with weekly visits from a cleaner. I went over afterwards. I had to ask Mark for the access code, but I went. The cleaner has done a good job. No dust. Not much of anything else, either—at least, not much that means anything now.

All these years, when I said I wanted to get home, I didn’t realize I still had one. Somehow I still feel like I don’t.

**Day 9**

I am so tired of briefings. I am so tired of questions. I am so tired of talking. I am so tired.

**Day 15**

Who would have predicted it? Two weeks back and I’ve already quit.

My mother’s mouth said nothing, but her eyes said that my father would be ashamed of me. Phoebe said she was proud, that it was a good decision—Starfleet shouldn’t get too used to having Janeways around. It would make them overconfident. Admiral Lkash said she would promote me if I stayed, but I am no longer interested in being bought off.

I don’t know why I did it, exactly. I don’t know when I started to see Starfleet as an organization that might not be worthy of all the respect I had always given it. All I know is that I have given them the last seven years of my life, all year, every year. And the person I forced myself to become in that time, just to keep walking and breathing and to keep 141 souls alive, is not the person I ever imagined myself becoming.

I don’t know what I imagined, particularly. Maybe it’s too late to find out.

**Day 17**

I was in a meeting today, and through the window of the conference room I saw a woman walk by who could have been Kes’s twin. So strange. She moved like Kes, deliberately, and gracefully, and quietly. She had Kes’s blond hair—long, still, like it was the last time I saw her—and pale coloring. I couldn’t tell about the ears. But as she walked past she turned slightly, glancing in the window, not quite catching my eye.

It was strange, because they’d been asking me about Kes, and Neelix, and whether I thought it was wise to bring two aliens aboard my ship, especially when one of them had used us to rescue the other. And I’d been dreaming about her—about all of them—about the Ocampa and the Kazon and the Brenari and the Borg and the Vidiians, the ocean planet and the duplicate Voyager and Naomi’s birthday and 8472 in human form and New Earth—dreaming of places I never should have been and will likely never see again.

I have these dreams, reliving events even Starfleet can’t decide how to read, and then I relive them aloud for admirals and commodores and computers and perhaps, maybe, for myself as well. And at night I go back to my rooms in visiting officers’ quarters and think about walking on soil for the rest of my life.

I live in the future and dream in the past but I always wake up in the present.

**Day 19**

I ran into Chakotay in the officers’ mess today. I was exhausted, of course, and I could tell he was, too. We shared a polite smile. He said hello and that it must be a good sign that the guards at the door still called him sir. I hadn’t seen him for nearly two weeks and it was so strange after all those years. So strange, in fact, that I suggested we meet for dinner after the briefings had concluded for the day. His eyes burned with doubt but he said yes. Suddenly it felt like he was the only friend I had in the alpha quadrant and I wasn’t even sure that much was true. I didn’t like what that said about me.

**Day 19**

Chakotay and I ate sandwiches at a deli near headquarters; we were both too tired—and, I thought, too old, suddenly—to go much further. We smiled sheepishly across the table. I never thought I’d use the word “sheepish” to describe myself, but then, like I said, I don’t like who I’ve become. And I remember a time—and I hope Chakotay also remembers—when I was someone else.

I think he’s stunned that I quit. I think it was exactly what he didn’t expect. I think he’s got to rethink me.

As I licked spicy mustard from my fingers he asked what came next. I said I had no idea but that lying in a cornfield sounded nice, and did he know that corn was in season? He laughed, I laughed, and we went to this little soul food place in Oakland and had corn on the cob for dessert. Butter-and-sugar corn, grown not a hundred kilometers outside the city. Not bad at all, though not, of course, as good as what I’ll get in Indiana when I find the time to go. I ate three cobs and he ate three cobs and we had buttery fingers and faces and it wasn’t strange at all.

Afterwards we talked about the questions—the endless, eternal questions. Tuvix. The Borg. Species 8472. Riley Fraser. The Equinox. Seems that nearly everything they want to know is a potential minefield for me and my former first officer and former best friend. He frowned. I frowned.

I’m not sure either of us thinks it matters anymore, but it’s become a habit.

**Day 46**

They’ve decided, finally. They’ve given Chakotay a pardon and told him there will be no repercussions for his time with the Maquis. They let the other Maquis off weeks ago—Torres, Ayala, Chell, all of them. But they took their time with Chakotay. He won’t tell me what they said, exactly. I know they offered him a promotion and a command and he thanked them and resigned. I heard this through headquarters gossip before I heard it from him, and I walked to my next meeting wearing a smile that no one, even me, ever expected from Kathryn Janeway.

I think Chakotay wonders what Starfleet would do if they hadn’t lost so many officers and so many ships in the Dominion war. I wonder that, too. Of course as soon as he resigned they told him they had no further questions as of now, which meant that he was officially homeless.

When we met for lunch I gave him the access codes to my house in Berkeley and told him he could stay as long as he wanted. I didn’t think he would accept, but it was the simplest solution. His parents are dead, the Maquis are gone, Dorvan is uninhabitable, and neither of us is going back to Voyager even if we wanted to. I said he had to find a new home and that my house was as good a place to start as any. He promised to make me dinner and asked what would happen when Starfleet was through with me, too.

I said I didn’t know but that cornfield still sounded nice.

**Day 59**

Done. Over. Finished.

My Starfleet career, all in the past.

Chakotay was waiting for me at the house when I got back. He had coffee and a present: a small stone he’d taken from the Ocampa homeworld. It was dull brown, dusty still, with sharp edges and with veins of something like mica.

“Why did you keep this?” I asked him.

“I just thought that someday I’d like to remember how far we’d come,” he said.

I tossed the stone up in the air, over and over, thinking, until he reached out and caught it with one hand.

**Day 62**

Corn is still in season, barely. Some of the fields have been plowed under and the nights have started to have a chill. In the fields that are still growing, the stalks are so tall that lying between them was awkward at best. I’d forgotten to warn him that running through a cornfield hurts—the leaves can be sharp. So I stopped and waited for him, and we both doubled over, laughing. I knew the sound would carry to the house, and I could picture my mother on the porch, shaking her head at us. Finally we were in the dirt, a pair of middle-aged, unemployed, former Starfleet officers, with our hands clasped through a row of cornstalks and ants crawling in my hair.

The sky above was thick and threatening rain. Thunderstorms are still in season, too. I willed the rain to hold off for us. And we laughed, and laughed, until all there was left to do was breathe.

Maybe later, I told him, we’ll visit the places he lived on earth, his mother’s relatives, his sacred places. I told him I wanted to go to Wounded Knee and Chaco Canyon and he said that sounded nice, too. I told him I hoped we could go to Dorvan someday and all he did was squeeze my fingers.

The rain started just after we’d stood up, and we half-ran, half-walked to the house. We had mud all over our feet and splattered on our clothes. Mom had gone inside, but we sat on the porch steps and watched the water pour down. It beat on the roof, so we couldn’t hear each other talk, and the walkway became a river. I remembered another storm, years ago. I remembered the days after, replanting the tomatoes, fixing the shelter.

And I realized that that may have been the last time I recognized myself, until today.

I leaned into his shoulder and wrapped an arm around his waist. He started a little, but then his hand came up to rest on my watery hair. And we watched the rain.

I still don’t know what’s next. I still don’t know a lot of things.

But I’m looking forward to finding out.

* * *

_“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” ~ A. Quindlen_

> Story Links: [On nandamai.net](http://nandamai.net/fic/?p=61)


End file.
